Slift's ILION is an eighty-minute work of compressive density that, across eight movements, challenges traditional listening thresholds. Its architectonic scale is the kind of riff-driven tonnage that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have made their signature, but in many instances on the album, exceed that weight for lengthy, unbroken stretches. You're drawn into its tectonic heft, held inside a temporality that refuses the (segmented) logic of the attention economy.
The Toulouse trio has had a quite methodical escalation in output and audience response since formally joining in 2016. Space Is the Key (2017) was a fuzz-garage ode to four-minute songs. La Planète Inexplorée (2018) folded krautrock and Farfisa into a more sustained trance. Ummon (2020) then completed the pivot toward "psych-metal," swelling to epic Homeric odyssey space-rock territory. A viral 2019 KEXP session at Trans Musicales would solidify their escalation, making it distinctly visible internationally.
The Toulouse trio has had a quite methodical escalation in output and audience response since formally joining in 2016. Space Is the Key (2017) was a fuzz-garage ode to four-minute songs. La Planète Inexplorée (2018) folded krautrock and Farfisa into a more sustained trance. Ummon (2020) then completed the pivot toward "psych-metal," swelling to epic Homeric odyssey space-rock territory. A viral 2019 KEXP session at Trans Musicales would solidify their escalation, making it distinctly visible internationally.
Sub Pop's willingness to release an eighty-minute double album from a French countryside trio is a significant institutional fact. The label's identity was forged in Pacific Northwest grunge, and its recent roster has moved toward the intimacy of Weyes Blood and Beach House. Slift occupy a different position entirely. Their closest company on the label is the drone-doom genealogy of Earth and the sprawl of SUMAC.
ILION takes its name from the Greek designation for Troy, with Slift having stated that the album explores human emotional interiority, inviting listeners to reflect on their own inner worlds. Monumental and oceanic in its crushing force, it suggests the Homeric scaffolding functions as what Kodwo Eshun, theorising Afrofuturist sonic fiction, identified as a conceptual engine generating momentum without requiring resolution. The mythology gives the listener permission to submit to duration without insisting that duration signify narratively at every moment. It is an alibi for trance.
Across "The Words That Have Never Been Heard" and "Uruk," riffs accrete mass, gathering harmonic overtones and percussive weight through Canek Flores's metronomic insistence and Rémi Fossat's bass frequencies, mixed so high they function as a second melodic voice. The kinship here is with Ufomammut's Ecate. But where the Italian doom trio treated perceptual thresholds as psychoacoustic technology, Slift push further into deformation. "Weavers' Weft" stretches past nine minutes through sedimentation, with each instrumental layer deposited atop the last until the accumulated weight becomes the meaning itself.
ILION is also a collaborative construction. Its density owes as much to Olivier Cussac's meticulous layering as to the trio's live fury. Etienne Jaumet's saxophone and synthesisers on 'Confluence' introduce a timbre that the trio format alone can't generate. Clémence Lagier's choral vocals and Flores's vibraphone open pockets of vertical space and hymnic repetitions. Perhaps the demolition of Cussac's original Toulouse studio and the subsequent rural sessions near Veilhes add a layer of almost mythic displacement on the album's thematic focus on civilisational collapse.
The record belongs to a tendency among modern heavy experimental acts that privileges saturation aesthetics as the music's theoretical lodestar. It's the treatment of a listener's own physiological capacity as the intended site of meaning. The Australian duo Divide and Dissolve work closely in this regard, though their decolonial politics provide a different kind of ethical weight. For Slift, the saturation is mythically coded. The closing "Enter the Loop," a five-minute dirge whose corroded sludge recalls EyeHateGod's swamp, suggests the band understands their maximalism as ultimately self-consuming; think decay over resolve.
This is where the record enacts the phenomenology of the collapse of scale. In other words, the moment when accumulated force tips from sublimity into exhaustion, and that exhaustion becomes a form of meaning. ILION's final minutes inhabit the same affective territory as the closing sequences of Ben Rivers's films Two Years at Sea (2011) and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), where protracted duration dissolves focused attention into ambient consciousness. Some may say it is meandering, but such an approach undoubtedly resists every familiar category of spectatorship. Whether Slift intended this or whether it emerges as an artefact of their own compositional excess doesn't really matter in the end. The album exceeds its programme and becomes something the mythology cannot contain.
